Think about the user, not the search engine

Eli says: “Care more about the user than the search engine.”

Has the way that you do that changed over the last few years?

“It has changed from a technical standpoint but not from a marketing/product standpoint. I don’t think that ever changes. It’s like asking a storekeeper if the way they approach sales and how they approach their customers has changed in the year 2000 from the way they did it in 1900. It’s exactly the same, it’s the mediums that have changed.

In 1900, you wouldn’t have people coming into your store very often. You would approach them, have a conversation with them, walk them to the store, and help them buy things. In the year 2000, we had supermarkets and big box stores. In the year 2024, we’re going to have different experiences. The medium might change, but the approach should never change. SEO should be the exact same way.

In the year 2000, right after search engines came into existence, people went on Google/ Excite/Yahoo, and they typed in things indicating they wanted to buy something or learn something, so you built a website with content that they could learn and buy from. In the year 2024, you’re going to be doing the same thing, except the medium has changed a little bit.

The big thing in 2024, of course, is generative AI. Will Google have integrated generative AI for all users or not? We don’t know. In 2025, they probably will have. Last year we talked a bit about whether there would be other search engines. I predicted that there would be other search engines. I said that it could be Apple, Amazon, or Facebook. I had no idea that it was going to be ChatGPT. Whether ChatGPT is a meaningful search engine or not, it is a search engine. Whether the Bing integration with ChatGPT is a real change to the platform or not, it is still another search engine.

Having more search engines changes the way we do SEO because it becomes fragmented. You can’t just follow the rules of Google and expect to hit everyone. Right now, Google has more than a 90% market share. When there are more search engines, you change your methodology a little bit because you can’t optimize for six search engines. You can’t even optimize for two search engines. The right way to do SEO is to focus on the user and not the engine, which is just the medium through which they arrive on your website.

With generative AI, the queries will change and the way users experience content will change but, ultimately, the users are still the same people.”

Have we reached a point where search engines can understand your content without the need for on-page markup?

“I think we’ve been past that point for years. There’s still a debate around dofollow vs. nofollow links, and clients will ask me about it all the time. The concept came about in 2010, and we’re now going into 2024. It’s 14 years old.

We’re in a world where we’ve seen what generative AI can look like. We’re in a world where Google and other companies have self-driving taxis. Technology has changed. We’re well beyond the stage where you need to tell a search engine what is a real link and what is not. We’re even beyond the stage where you need to tell a search engine what the image alt text is.

Initially, image alt text was an accessibility feature. You tell the search engine what the image is so that it can be read out on an accessibility reader for someone who’s vision impaired. Now, technology is creating images from scratch, based on prompts. On Android devices, you have Google Lens which can look at an image and parse out what that image is.

We’re well beyond an age where you need to tell a search engine, ‘This is about the business. This is what the image is. This is content, etc.’ The engines can parse it themselves. Some SEOs get lost in these details, but I don’t think they’re necessary. I don’t think they give you a leg up.”

How do we find out why users are searching instead of what they’re searching for?

“It’s very simple: you just have to ask the users.

I find this all the time. I talk to businesses, and we talk about their keywords and who their users are. When I say, ‘Have you asked them?’, they say, ‘That’s a novel idea!’ It shouldn’t be a novel idea. Technology has allowed us to step too far back from who the customer is.

Earlier I talked about a storekeeper walking the customer through the store to understand what they want. We can still do that, even in an age of technology. You can look at your analytics and try to understand the user’s journey on the website. You can even use generative AI to have a conversation with the user and learn what they want. The best way to understand users is to talk to them but you don’t need to have a direct conversation. You can use technology to understand their needs. That’s a representation of what they’re doing when they type a query into a search engine.

Google knows this. Before generative AI, you would input a query and Google would match intent to that query. Let’s say I searched for ‘podcasting software’, and a podcasting platform didn’t know they were supposed to use the word ‘software’, so they used the word ‘platform’ on their page instead. Google would still match the user to that even though they never used the word ‘software’ because they understood the intent behind both the website and the user.

Now we’re in the world of generative AI, which takes the entire concept of keywords away. It’s about parsing what the user said and then the engine responding to that. Now, they can serve website results by parsing both the website and the query based on generative AI. The only defence you have against that is understanding the user and creating for the user.”

Is there any software that can determine the ‘why’ behind user behaviour?

“I don’t think there is a pure software solution right now. Let’s say you have a bunch of keywords; those are one-dimensional. All the SEO research tools offer one-dimensional keywords. Many clients that I have worked with look at keyword research as the gospel for what they should be doing without understanding that some users are inputting those keywords and looking for something completely different from what their website or company offers.

You need to take those keywords and understand the user. There is no be-all-end-all solution for taking what the user searched, seeing their user journey, and knowing what to do. You need the human intelligence to look at what they have searched. Why did they search it? Where’d they end up? Did they buy?

Generative AI can be useful here because you can have conversations with the users. Many websites have chatbots that are useless. They’re essentially search engines. Let’s say I am trying to cancel my internet service. I go on the website, and it gives me a chatbot that says, ‘What do you want?’ I say, ‘I want to cancel.’ and then it says, ‘Here’s a good article about cancelling.’ It should be having a conversation about why I want to cancel, trying to understand my needs and intents based on generative AI, and then recognising whether I should talk to a representative, read an article, receive a call, etc. Generative AI could be better used for having those conversations, but the software needs to improve.”

Once you’ve defined your ‘whys’, how do you incorporate those into your content?

“You need to speak to the user based on those ‘whys’, whatever it is that you’re doing. If you’re selling mortgages, there are so many other people who sell mortgages too, but you know your users and you have a particular angle.

Before the internet age, if you were a mortgage broker, you put an ad in the newspaper or the Yellow Pages, and people called you and you found out what they wanted and offered your particular skills. Mortgage brokers specialised in that, and they should still specialise in that. Now, they need to use websites and content in an asynchronous way to show how they cater to those users.

A mortgage broker that caters to users with complicated job situations shouldn’t be writing generic content about mortgages. They have an angle, they have a perfect customer, and they have a specific skill set. Their content should be about that.”

Has this changed the way that SEO needs to interact with other marketing channels?

“I have always felt that SEO does not interact with other marketing channels enough. If you use an agency to do your SEO, then they’re certainly not interacting with other marketing channels because they’re completely siloed. One agency does paid and one agency does organic, and they’re not crossing wires or understanding things. In-house, the teams are almost pitted against each other. The paid team does this, the email team does that, and the organic team does something else.

SEO should be talking to those other teams and learning about what the user/customer wants. There’s an appropriate place in the funnel for each of these channels, where they can help each other out. Organic is great at top-of-funnel where users are curious about something. Paid is great at mid-funnel because they have ad copy to draw the user in. Email is better at bottom-of-funnel or retention. Social is good at top-of-funnel and retention. All of these channels should be working together so that everyone is building toward that final conversion.

I don’t think that has changed in the current world. Marketing teams should work together to acquire the user. It doesn’t matter who wins and, more than likely, it won’t be the SEO channel.

That’s a big problem with the way SEO is measured. CEOs or whoever’s hiring an agency is always looking for the win: ‘I hired this SEO agency, and it didn’t work out because I didn’t get any conversions.’ It’s not necessarily designed to get conversions. If you’re top-of-funnel and people need some time to buy and learn, then you’re not going to get the conversion. That doesn’t mean it didn’t work.”

What are some better ways to measure the financial value of SEO today?

“It’s going to be hard. In a perfect world, you should be doing blended attribution and understanding how each channel works for the end goal. That’s an ideal but I’ve never seen a company achieve that.

The reality is you have to better understand the user and the buyer’s journey, then you can approximate some sort of value. If you’re selling e-commerce products, SEO probably does win. You can say that whoever got the last piece of the conversion for each product is the channel that wins. If you’re selling a long-sales-funnel product or service, where there are many different touchpoints, you can try to approximate how SEO contributed by understanding and talking to the user.

The good thing about SEO is that it’s relatively cheap compared to every other channel. If you’re trying to approximate some sort of value and SEO only contributes 10%, SEO is typically only 10% of the expense. Paid is expensive and there’s a cost for every email sent out. With Organic, you’re creating content and it amortises over time as it drives conversion. Even if you’re more truthful about the contribution, it’s still highly profitable.”

With AI becoming incorporated into search results and an ever-increasing focus on the number one position, is there still value to being on the bottom of the first page?

“I think so. I always target being on the first page because you have the user, but it depends on what you’re doing.

If you’re talking about a product or service where it takes a long time for people to understand what they’re buying, being on the first page means that they will see you. It doesn’t matter whether you’re number one because it’s not direct to conversion. As they do their research, they’ll change their query and, eventually, you’ll end up higher and they will see you. That’s what SEO still needs to do; make sure the content is seen.

If you’re trying to replicate what could easily be pulled out of pages and put into a generative AI response, then that was designed to go away, to begin with.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“SEO always has a sense of urgency over everything at the same time. Something I use with all of my clients is called the RICE format. It’s a way of project managing based on Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort.

You take each of your initiatives and you score them. You can score 1-10, high/medium/low, or however you want. When you score things you discover where you’re spending your time and where you are getting results. Taking the time to understand where your efforts are being placed will help you to prioritise.

No SEO wants to come in and say, ‘Just change the title tag and that’s it. That’s my job today.’ but if you see that there’s going to be a high impact from it, it’s easy, and you’re fairly confident it will have an impact, then do it. You will get your win and earn your political capital. On the other hand, if you want to change the privacy policy and you need to go to legal and do all these things, maybe that’s not as important.

Take a step back to score, prioritise, and understand what each of the initiatives you’re working on is going to do. The things you should focus on will bubble up to the surface.”

Eli Schwartz is a Strategic SEO Consultant and Growth Advisor and Author of Product-Led SEO, and you can find him over at EliSchwartz.co.